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Uhuru Kenyatta Must Obey the Court and Pay Teachers their Salary Increments

In August 2015, the Supreme Court of Kenya upheld a ruling by the Court of Appeal to have primary and secondary school teachers awarded a 50-60 per cent salary increase, totaling Ksh17 billion. The Labor Court had similarly ruled in their favor in June. However, Uhuru Kenyatta’s Jubilee Government has refused to honor the Supreme Court’s judgment and has lodged an appeal against it. Kenyatta is categorical that his government will not honor the court order since there is no money for the pay rise. “That was a court error. I can’t pay, I won’t pay”, he told journalists.

The current dispute between the teachers and their employer, the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) dates back to 1997 when the teachers went on strike for two weeks demanding a 150-200% salary increase. Since it was an election year, then-Dictator Daniel arap Moi’s government agreed to pay them to avert a political crisis. The increment was to be implemented in phases during a period of five years. But 18 years later, this has not been honored and every sitting government’s excuse has been they cannot manage to pay the agreed salary. As a consequence, the teachers in public schools are currently on strike, and the pupils have not been taught since they reported back to school after the August holidays. This is a crucial school term for pupils in Class Eight and Form Four, who expect to sit their final year examinations.

Uhuru is not new to the salary crisis which he faced as Finance Minister under former President Kibaki’s government. What angers many Kenyans is the fact that the Jubilee government has refused to obey the Supreme Court which awarded Uhuru the presidency in 2013, against a petition by former Prime Minister, Raila Odinga. Uhuru has mentioned that he will not let Kenya go the Greek-way by borrowing more money to pay teachers. He also claims that by giving in to their demand, the public wage bill will be unsustainable, and other civil servants would also demand a raise. Uhuru Kenyatta’s corrupt government has repeatedly misused taxpayers’ money on unnecessary expenses, yet cannot pay the teachers’ salary increase which has been a pending issue for many years.

Corruption and high wage bill
Critics and Jubilee sycophants alike feel the government can adjust its national budget to fit in the new pay by scaling down on recurrent expenditure. Uhuru, for instance, can lead the way by cutting down on his numerous foreign trips, which are mainly for marketing his image as a “come-back kid” after his trial was dropped by the International Criminal Court (ICC). On June 15, 2015 the Business Daily newspaper published an article titled: “Uhuru’s frequent flier diary strains State House budget” which detailed the cost of Uhuru’s foreign trips. “Mr. Kenyatta’s foreign trips have particularly come under scrutiny because the majority have been made to countries Kenya trades the least with, bringing into question what value the taxpayer is getting for the money spent. During his travels, Mr. Kenyatta is usually accompanied by large delegations, including the security detail and senior government officials who draw hefty sums in travelling allowances.

Senior members of a presidential delegation reportedly receive a daily out-of-pocket allowance of up to $400 (Sh40,000) while the government directly pays for their food and accommodation. The Controller of Budget’s (COB) half-year report for the period ending December 2014 indicated that the Presidency consumed Sh75 million in foreign travels — Sh15 million more than what was spent during a similar period the previous year. The Presidency consists of the offices of the President and the Deputy President. But the budget-bursting impact of Mr. Kenyatta’s frequent-flier lifestyle lies in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which in the corresponding period spent Sh604 million on foreign travel, a huge growth over the previous year’s Sh416 million.”

Devolution and Planning Cabinet Secretary Anne Waiguru (who is Uhuru’s favorite) has just revealed the names of 21 officers at her ministry and the National Youth Service (NYS) who made fraudulent payments amounting to Ksh791 million “to four suppliers for road construction and delivery of building materials between December 2014 and April 2015”, as reported in the Daily Nation newspaper on September 11, 2015. Further, “there was conspiracy to defraud the NYS Sh695 million in respect of committed disputed transactions.” Waiguru has now accepted there is extreme corruption in her ministry yet she had earlier denied that no money had been lost fraudulently.

Uhuru Kenyatta has not shown political-will to fight corruption and even the suspension of five Cabinet Secretaries (CSs) earlier this year, was stage-managed to show President Barack Obama that things were in order, just before he traveled to Kenya. The CSs are gradually being exculpated from the corruption charges and will soon be back to loot public coffers. The latest perception poll ranking by the research firm IPSOS Synovate on the most corrupt officials in the Jubilee government and opposition CORD, has “named suspended Lands Cabinet Secretary Charity Ngilu as the most corrupt official with 50 per cent due to her alleged links to the Karen land saga. Deputy President William Ruto was named second (31 per cent) for his alleged connections to Langata Road Primary School land case, the ‘hustler’s jet’ and Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital sagas.” If Uhuru’s deputy Ruto is seen as very corrupt, what then, do people think of Uhuru’s leadership?

Uhuru Kenyatta should pay the striking teachers because money is available to pay for the corrupt lavish lifestyles of his cronies and William Ruto’s ICC expenses. Teachers deserve the pay instead of Uhuru’s political thieving sycophants. Uhuru recently bloated his government by offering public jobs to the sons and daughters of Michuki, Nyachae and Kibaki who are from extremely wealthy families and do no merit such jobs. Uhuru’s children and those of his political class do not attend public schools, so he cannot empathize with the poor teachers among whom he got a lot of presidential votes in 2013. Teachers should not vote for him in 2017. “Uhuru awalipe Walimu!”

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Here is a snapshot of things that would not be tolerated in any other country in the world:

-“Dr” Mugo wa Wairimu is pictured raping a patient. His clinic is still open. There has been no censure of the people that allowed the clinic operated by a quack to remain open

-An MP allegedly rapes a woman in his office after administering a forced HIV test. The man is still an MP with all allowances to boot

-A cabinet secretary denies, then admits the theft of 800 million shillings ( over 5 million dollars) from her docket. She is still firmly in charge and thumbing her pretty nose at the opposition for calling on her to step down

When was the last time President Uhuru Kenyatta held a full Cabinet meeting? We are told it has been quite some time since the Cabinet met. It is unclear why, but we are told it is because Uhuru and Deputy President William Ruto cannot agree on changes in the Cabinet. While Uhuru wants to bring in new faces, Ruto wants all those suspended and cleared reinstated.

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There was celebration and merry-making when Devolution CS Anne Waiguru announced the suspension of 21 NYS officials accused of fraud. Corridors is told one of the scam’s architects designed a new plan to avoid prosecution. He wants to become a prosecution witness to twist evidence in his favour and fix those who stood or may wish to stand in his way to freedom.

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The white goat offered as apology to the Luo community by political analyst Mutahi Ngunyi has disappeared. Sources told Corridors the goat jumped off an open pick-up en-route to Nyanza before the vehicle left Nairobi. It is said LSK boss Apollo Mboya insisted that the goat had to be sent to the Luo Council of Elders. Those in the know say the goat disappeared on Riverside estate on Saturday. Some say the spirit of the elders rejected the goat.

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Why did top political leaders from Central Kenya snub the unveiling of the Mau Mau monument on Saturday? A top city lawyer said the region’s leadership does not understand the historical struggle of their people. According to him, opposition leader Raila Odinga’s presence at the event makes him the best President Kenya never had. He said Raila understands the plight of everybody in society and never shies away from meeting them.
– See more at: http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/corridors-power-253#sthash.b3SdeR45.dpuf

eptember 11, 2015
Opium of the People? The Religious Heritage of Karl Marx and the Frankfurt School

by Michael Welton

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Pretty well everyone knows that Marx wrote that “religion is the opium of the people.” Most assume that he invented this metaphorical critique of religion—in a word, writing religion off as a kind of drug fed to the masses to keep their noses rubbed in the mud. But Michael Lowy, in War of the Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (1996), asks the question whether this poignant aphorism really catches the quintessence of Marx’s own views on religion.

Lowy points out that this metaphor was, in fact, not specific to Marx himself. It was circulating in the cultural ethos of post-Hegelian thinkers in the 1840s. In 1840, for instance, Moses Hess says: “Welcome be a religion that pours into the bitter chalice of the suffering human species some sweet, soporific drops of spiritual opium, some drops of love, hope and faith.” He thought religion could make life somewhat bearable.

Shortly after while Marx was busy flipping Hegel on his head, Lowy reminds us that this infamous quotation captures the dual character of religion. “Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of an unspiritual situation. It is the opiate of the people.”

Religion as alienated humanity

Unlike some Enlightenment foes of religion, Marx perceived religion as the sign of the alienated condition of humanity. The distress they feel—under the oppressive conditions of life—is real, and religion enables people to hang in there until the conditions of life change and humans can discover their authentic spiritual existence as makers of history. And the notion of “spirit of an unspiritual situation” contains emancipatory potential: this spirit can rebel.

Thus, Marx leaves open the door that later Frankfurt School theorists could venture through. Because Marx did not develop his thinking regarding how religion as a form of consciousness can be explained with reference to the material conditions and social relations of life, critical theory and theology could take up this perplexing task.

Liberating reason from the church of positivism

The Frankfurt School (founded in 1923 as an inter-disciplinary institute to study the emancipatory possibilities of the time) intellectuals worked within a dual framework. They shared the Enlightenment scepticism towards religion’s status as a form of knowledge and its ambiguous relationship to political authority and economic power. But they didn’t stop there: they were in a different intellectual and political world.

The euphoric celebration of the glories of Reason had dissipated. The French Revolution had turned to terror. The Russian Revolution went off the rails into ghastly forms of oppression and murder. In his introduction to the Frankfurt School on Religion: key writings by the major thinkers, Eduardo Mendieta (2005) boldly declares: “If for the philosophes reason was to be rescued from the church and theology, for the Frankfurt School theorists reason was to be liberated from the church of positivism and the theology of the market” (p. 2).

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer thought the Enlightenment Project that had promised a “cornucopia of utopian amenities, had turned into a demonic machine used for crushing skills and decimating the earth” (Mendieta, 2005, p. 4). It was also astonishingly true that God had not quite died. Nor had the Churches folded up their tents. The Church even had its own Enlightenment. Ordinary folks through the eighteenth, nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries maintained their piety (D. MacCulloch, Christianity: the first three thousand years [2009]). The religious sighing, yearning and longing for another world had survived many attacks since the French Revolution of 1789.

Still, something deep and profound had changed in the “structure of consciousness” of modern Europeans. As Mark C. Taylor (“Introduction,” in M.C. Taylor (Ed.), Critical terms for religious studies [1998]) expresses it incisively, “Religious devotion and belief do not simply disappear but initially are turned inward in a way that renders them as invisible as the transcendent God who is present as an abiding absence” (p. 2).

The acerbic Kierkegaard (1985) in Fear and Trembling gazes at his imaginary “knight of faith” and discovers that he “looks just like a tax collector!” (p. 68). Nothing seems to be telegraphed from the infinite. He is all too comfortable in the delicious world.

Recruiting theology to rescue reason

The irony in Adorno and Horkheimer’s attempts to recruit theology and religious experience to “rescue reason by unmasking the idolatry and fetishism of the market and technology, and by returning to the subject of subjective freedom” (Mendieta, p. 8) must not escape us. The same can be said about Habermas’ profound awareness over the last two or so decades that “something is missing” (J. Habermas et al., An Awareness of What is Missing: faith and reason in a post-secular age [2010]).

We can state, then, that the atheistic sceptics of the Frankfurt School were intelligent enough to resist ideas prevalent in early cultural anthropology that religion was only a stage in humankind’s evolution from magic to science.

Although the notion of “religious experience” gives critical scholars difficulty and may still be an irritant to many, the Frankfurt School senses that reason had to be expansive enough to comprehend, if only partially, the world’s multi-faceted presence to us. And religious knowledge and experience of the transcendent are precisely that troublesome and irksome part of this expansive reason.

Mendieta provides a valuable guide to the different ways the Frankfurt School re-worked the suggestive Marxian idea of religion’s resistance to being crushed by the Market or Technology. Even the uttering of a prayer or participating in the Eucharist ritual is a small act of resistance to succumbing to instrumental rationality. The Frankfurt School version of critical philosophy found fertile soil in religion for its own emancipatory project. Religion was not an unbearably bleak wasteland

A lexicon of anti-fetishism

Whatever the evident limitations of religion, Adorno and Horkheimer—both of whom were shaped by a secularized Jewish messianism—perceived that Judaism and Christianity harboured a “lexicon of transcendence and anti-fetishism” (Mendieta, 2005, p. 9). It is as if the lost souls of the Enlightenment came knocking at religion’s door, hoping to be invited in to see something that cracked open a fossilized reason. They did, in fact, enter and discovered that theology resides and hovers close to the luminous and the liminal. It catches glimpses of the flecks of light yet remaining from the God who seemingly exiled himself from the world, leaving only some traces behind. Perhaps if we fan into flames, Justice will return to us.

Theology rescues reason from disintegrating into a triumphant instrumental rationality. Commitments to never close off the transcendent domain; God is “wholly other” and, for believers, the ultimate judge of the unjust world: these affirmations provide lexical sources for use and translation by the critical philosophers of the Frankfurt School.

The radical intellectual discipline and rigorous desire for the truth leads Adorno and Horkheimer to assert a “negative theology”, that is, a theology that refuses to permit “God” to be reconciled to the misery and suffering of the world as divine legitimator.

Throughout his illustrious career, Horkheimer grappled with both the moral message of Judaism and Christianity and their notion of transcendent deity. While not rejecting Christianity’s moral message outright, Horkheimer believed that one couldn’t trust religion to be irrevocably critical and rebellious. We are only too aware of the ingenious ways the Bible can be used to justify violence or colonial subjugation of peoples (see M. Prior, The Bible and colonialism: a moral critique [1997]).

The impossibility of closure

But one could rescue the “moral message of universal dignity and solidarity that inspires criticism of prevailing suffering and oppression” (M. Cooke, “Critical theory and religion,” in D.Z. Phillips and T. Feria (Eds.), Philosophy and Religion in the 21st Century [2001], p. 215). In a sense, this filtering and rescuing process criticizes religion as opium in the name of religion as the beating heart of the yearning for a just world. Horkheimer also asserts that the “idea of God [serves] as arbiter of validity and bestower of such meaning” (p. 221). Horkheimer thinks that: “Without God one will try in vain to preserve absolute meaning” (as cited, p. 216). God, then, becomes the ultimate arbiter of truth.

Cooke (2001) asserts that “an idea of God plays a crucial role in his [Horkheimer] critical social theory insofar as it marks the impossibility of closure, thereby testifying to the need for never-ending struggle to achieve a better order of things.” Cooke thinks that “this idea is most useful when it is released from its religious framework and understood in a purely negative, critical way” (p. 221).

For his part, Habermas acknowledges that with the collapse of the philosophy of history that assumed that God was providentially leading history to an end-point of reconciliation, religion—if engaged critically—could release semantic and spiritual potential to confront the positivity of a world reduced to instrumental forms of rationality. But Habermas is wary of Horkheimer’s “bad utopianism.”

The problem, as Habermas perceives it, is that Horkheimer and Adorno’s notion of messianic redemptive power lacks grounding in concrete social practices of human beings. It simply fails to link up convincingly with the way we usually speak and act in our secularized world.

Habermas will also challenge Horkheimer’s idea that critical theory needs God to justify its truth claims and establish the moral and ethical framework for society. Modernity lowers transcendence into the world. We are the ones who create values, meaning systems and norms to guide us. We no longer ground our meaning-systems or institutions in sources external to ourselves. But while asserting this, Habermas takes the unusual step of arguing that the religious lexicon may contain intuitions and ideas that could inform our sensibility as we walk on our own.

The youthful Marx wanted humanity to revolve around itself: to be masters of their own destiny. The later critical theorists of the Frankfurt School (from Adorno to Habermas) could meet on common ground with some Christians in the affirmation that this “yearning for the wholly other, is a yearning for a truth whose condition of possibility is the just society. Theology, as the medium in which religion is able to speak and disclose its truth content, is at the service of a critical social theory” (Mendieta, 2005, p. 11).

“This is what makes the Frankfurt School’s approach to religion and theology particularly fertile and generative today. For in the Frankfurt School’s critical theory of religion we find a dual confrontation with the religious sources of modern, European, and Western Culture, sources that unleashed a fateful dialectic of introjected and sacrificial violence, and an attempt to rescue what makes the religious not just a source of alienation and negation of the world, but also of remembrance, hope, redemption, and utopia” (ibid.).

These words–remembrance, hope, redemption and utopia—are still needed in the lexicon of Left Humanism.

65Yr Old German Dumps His 26 Year old African Wife On Facebook, Acuses Her Of Infidelity, Stealing His Car And Money

A 65-year-old German Pleschke Heinz-Georg took to his official Facebook account to post a message announcing the official separation from his Kenyan wife. He wrote:

“All friends, note. After the unfortunate incidents in recent weeks, caused by the unlawful conduct before my wife (name withheld), I hereby give official separation from her now on, I take no liability for all her financial or other transactions. I wish her all the best for the future. But please, do not come back.”

Mr. Heinz and his young wife have been together for 8 years. They met in 2007 and tied the knot in 2011. In an interview with Citizen Digital, he revealed how he met his wife and other sundry details. “I met my wife in 2007 in Mombasa. Her daughter was six-months-old then. She also told me her dad had died in a road accident in Malindi. So,she needed somebody to take care of her. I agreed to chip in. I told her am too old to marry her; but she told me age is just but a number. She wanted something more meaningful out of the relationship, so I agreed to marry her in 2011. We have now been together for eight years – four dating, four in marriage.” The German also said that until their split, he was the sole provider and sustainer of his wife’s lifestyle. “All through I made sure I supported her financially and she lacked nothing. I would also make sure I visited her in Kenya from Germany two times a year; in June and December. I made sure she is living well – I booked her an apartment in Ukunda, opened her salon business, which I came to understand she closed down, sold it for small money and used the funds to finance her hefty lifestyle,” Sharing his relocation plans with his wife, George disclosed: “I also told her I know she misses me, but asked her to be patient till I retire in 2013, and then I would come and live with her in Kenya forever. Perhaps buy a plot, make a home and be in each other’s arms.”

Though he was happy to take care of her, Georg knew his wife is extravagant.
“She’s the high maintenance kind of woman who likes to show off. She wasted the money on drinking with her friends, and she could hotel-hop with her clique drinking all kinds of expensive liquor.”

When asked if he was suspicious of his wife’s philandering ways, he said:

“Some of her friends reported to me these things, but I had no evidence. I had to trust her – she was my wife. Some of them even told me she is sleeping around.”
On the incidents that led to his disowning her on Facebook, he narrated:
“On Friday, July 17, I withdrew Sh1 million from the bank. She’d been nagging me to buy her a car, so we agreed we’ll use the money to purchase one on Monday, July 20. I however asked her to keep the money safe in the wardrobe – just to see if I could trust her.”

On Saturday, July 18, the couple visited a restaurant, and Georg says she asked him for permission to use his car to visit a friend.

“She’d promised she’d come pick me after two hours. The period elapsed, and several hours later I still did not see her. I tried calling her but her cell phone was switched off. I got worried and reported the matter to police. I then proceeded home; only to be shocked to find her belonging plus the Sh1 million she’d kept in the wardrobe missing.”

He revealed the police could not trace her, and that she’d changed her phone number. However, he contacted his wife’s friends who told him that she had eloped with another man who resides in Mombasa. When he got in touch with his wife on Facebook, Heinz claims she opened up why she left without warning.

“In one of the messages, she sent me read: ‘I spent eight years of my young life with you. I just took Sh1 million and you are complaining! I needed the car too to start a new life.’” he said.

The 65-year-old narrated how he sold his home and property in Germany to come start a new life with his wife in Kenya.

“After retiring from work in 2013 and finishing my relocation plans from Germany, I joined my wife in Mombasa in June 2015. I even told her maybe I have 25 years of life, and that our lives would be a happy one with no financial difficulties. But I am sad, she ended up disappointing me! I am hearing through our mutual friend that she said if I forgive her, she’d come back. But I have moved on; I just want a divorce!”
Meanwhile, his wife commented on the post saying,

“I don’t argue with fools. I am your third wife by law without counting girlfriends in between. Does it mean every woman you met is bad? Go to court and apply for a divorce. Facebook won’t help you in any way.”

u kenyattas father was a land grabber, so what. Todays kenya is more democratic and nobody will stop u from creating developments etc. Kenya is a battle ground now like any other western develoved countries, come down and battle it out with indians who make their millions in 3yrs, then move to england or australia. Uhuru asked kenyans living in texas sometime ago to come and help him drill oil in turkana, instead of him doing the impossible management.

Mr Uhuru, should stop the “can’t pay won’t pay” attitude and respect the court ruling of paying the teachers, the same court that put him into power.

The Jubilee government created this mess because since ascending to the hot seat in 2013, President Kenyatta has presided over a spendthrift regime that is obsessed with grandiose showcase projects .

Corruption has also become a daily part of life and anyone who raises the alarm over corruption is branded as an enemy of development or a tool of the Opposition.

Why did Uhuru not raise a finger when MPs raised their own salaries and benefits? We did not hear him protest or say that we do not have money.

In an article written by David Herbling in the Business Daily dated in (July 23 2013)

Kenyan legislators have been ranked the second-highest paid lawmakers in the world, beating their counterparts from the developed economies of US, Britain and Japan.

A study by the UK-based Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) shows the MPs’ basic pay, which excludes allowances, is 76 times Kenya’s GDP per capita of Sh84,624.

The politicians earn a basic salary of Sh6.39 million per year but Kenya’s per capita income is much lower than that of rich countries, translating into comparatively high pay for the MPs.

We did not also hear the president protest for the money given to pay retirement perks to the two former Presidents ( Kibaki and Moi)

According to an article retrieved form the Nations newspaper (15-09-11)

Mr Kibaki took home Sh25 million lump sum having served as President for two terms. He was also getting a pension of Sh560, 000 a month, entertainment allowance of Sh280, 000 and Sh300, 000 a month housing allowance for his urban and rural homes.

In addition, retired presidents get two new cars every three years, two personal assistants, four secretaries, four messengers, four drivers and bodyguards.

What these teachers are simply asking is an increase in their salary so they can be able to meet the rising costs of daily living, not to buy limousines or live in luxury.